War

Follow this link to an article in Spiegel Online about plans to investigate what really happened in the brief war between Russia and Georgia. Many people are beginning to think that Saakashvili lied about the sequence of events. The story also shows that Georgia might not be quite the democracy that our side paints it to be.

Perhaps it will become clearer that early reports one gets from the U.S. media are heavily tainted by influence form our government in Washington.

It is also clear that to get contrary information one must read news sources from outside this country. I have not yet seen this story reported by U.S. media.

Follow this link to the OpEd Piece in the New York Times by Barack Obama about withdrawing our troops from Iraq.

A paragraph toward the end of the piece caught my attention:

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.

Has he noticed how this is turning into the quagmire that finally defeated the Soviet Union? We can try more troops, but be prepared with Plan B.

The constant primary campaign rhetoric that Iraq was the wrong war and Afghanistan was the right war might get us trapped into a hopeless situation. I hope Obama is a lot smarter than he appeared to be when he helped the Democratic Party to bungle the handling of the recent FISA bill.

I have heard a report that Ford Motor Company is going to sell the Jaguar and Land Rover divisions to Tata Motors of India. It struck me as extremely ironic that a company in a former colony of Great Britain would take over two iconic British automobile brands.

I tried to think of a similar scenario that could occur in the United States to make it more clear to a domestic audience the full import of this chain of events.

What I finally came up with is the United States continuing the war in Iraq until success. This would mean that Iraq would finally stabilize and its economy could once again flourish given their vast oil resources.

Unfortunately the cost to the United States for this success was a hollowing out of the U.S. economy. Our own companies would end up struggling more and more for survival. The dollar would continue to slide and the price of oil denominated in dollars would continue to rise. Eventually a company in the wealthy country of Iraq would have to come to the rescue of General Motors by buying up its Cadillac division.

I wonder if anyone in Great Britain in 1950 would think that an Indian company would ever own Jaguar and Land Rover. I wonder if anyone in the U.S. in 2008 could conceive of the possibility that the downfall of the U.S. began with the Iraq war. What could we do to prevent this from happening? Or is it too late?

March 6, 2008 interview with Joseph Stiglitz, co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War, on the costs of the invasion of Iraq – and the gloomy prospects for the U.S. economy.

There are long range economic consequences for us to which we have already been committed because of this war. If you intend to live in this economy for any length of time, you ought to listen to this interview.

I have been aware of Joseph Stiglitz and his book for quite some time. This is the first time I have actually paid attention to what he is saying. Originally, I thought that there wouldn’t be anything in the book that I didn’t already know. How wrong I was.